Tuesday, July 5, 2016

A very prominent vegan activist took an informal poll on Facebook, asking her followers to comment "God" or "No God." Most people put an explanation with their comment, so we could learn more of their reasoning. The results were quite surprising to me: the overwhelming majority of the responders were atheist! I cannot remember how many people responded, but it was a sizeable number of people.

A very rough guess at the statistics would be that 80% of the people were atheist, 15% were spiritual or agnostic, and 5% were Christian or another religion. I thought the spiritual number would be the highest, followed by Christians since they are the majority in society, so this was a real revelation.

What could these results show? I am not sure, but I will guess.

1. The vegans may have become atheist because of the unfairness of animal cruelty. They could have looked at the concept of a loving god who fixes wrongs, and they could see that help never comes for the animals.

2. Vegans look at the unfairness of life itself;

3. Vegans may have been atheist in the first place and are just more likely to become vegan because they take action in this world, and are simply good people.

4. Religious people are taken in by all the excuses in the Bible to eat meat - God says people started eating meat after "the fall"; God loved the smell of burning animal flesh; God said animals are here for our use; God says we have dominion over the animals. 5. God had a thing for bloody sacrifices. (Vegetarianism was rather popular in the first century AD, but all those religious groups were wiped out by the Christians.)

Again, I do not know the reason for so many atheists in the vegan ranks, but it sure surprised me. What a welcome surprise!

About Me

I became an atheist thanks to YouTube! For years I hovered between having a God, being "spiritual" and being agnostic - in fact, most of my life. There was only a short period of time when I was a Jesus Freak along with my brother, but I did not fit in with his group. I attended a religious college for two years and felt like the "odd woman out" there as well. One day on the main page of AOL there was a picture of Kirk Cameron and another picture of a pretty young blond woman with curly long hair and a cute little chin. They said she got more "hits" on YouTube than Kirk did! Of course, it was Zomgitscriss! I watched her video and thought, "You know, I think like she does, but she is a lot smarter than I am!" I watched more of her videos, and she said it was just a hop, skip and jump from agnosticism to atheism. I thought, "Oh, I could never be an atheist - it's such a harsh word!" I decided to look at her favorites and saw a big guy with long hair who looked like he belonged in a motorcycle gang. I smirked and thought, "This will be good - let's see what he has to say," thinking he had to sound dumb. It turned out to be Aron Ra, and I was treated to video after video about evolution, taxonomy and phylogeny - subjects I knew nothing about! What an education! One day, I clicked on Pangeaprogress' videos. I saw his beautiful nature videos of Africa. Suddenly, a pack of lions surrounded an antelope and started eating her, slowly, starting at the hips and wherever they could bite. I was totally shocked. I had been overprotected a good share of my life, and my mother always told me that animals "always went right for the neck and the death was over in an instant." Well, it wasn't. From that moment on, I was an atheist. No God could sit by and watch such cruelty and pain and suffering and allow it to happen. No excuses. This is how YouTube converted me, and my eyes have been opened to so many new ideas thanks to the Internet!